According to the report, an average of 51% of adults and 72% of minors in the EU have pirated digital content, with Poland and Spain averaging the highest rates of all countries surveyed. Nevertheless, displacement rates (the impact of piracy on legitimate sales) were found to be negligible or non-existent for music, books and games, while rates for films and TV were in line with previous digital piracy studies.

Most interesting is the fact that the study found that illegal game downloads actually lead to an increase in legal purchases. The report concludes that tactics like video game microtransactions are proving effective in converting illegal users to paying users.

The full report goes in-depth regarding potential factors influencing piracy and the challenges of accurately tracking its impact on legitimate sales, but the researchers ultimately conclude that there is no robust statistical evidence that illegal downloads reduce legal sales. That's big news, which makes it all the more troubling that the EU effectively buried it for two years.

The figures show that, between 2004 and 2013, an average of 71.7 per cent of students at TCD graduated with either a 1st or a 2.1. DCU and UCC had the next highest rate of such awards (64.3 per cent and 64.2 per cent respectively), followed by UCD (55.8 per cent), NUI Galway (54.7 per cent), Maynooth University (53.7 per cent) and University of Limerick (50.2 per cent).

'PLOS and Mozilla conducted a month-long pilot study in which professional developers
performed code reviews on software associated with papers published in PLOS
Computational Biology. While the developers felt the reviews were limited by (a) lack of
familiarity with the domain and (b) lack of two-way contact with authors, the scientists
appreciated the reviews, and both sides were enthusiastic about repeating the experiment. '

Actually sounds like it was more successful than this summary implies.

OfCom has published a report on online piracy, which found that the practice is becoming less common and that pirates tend to spend more on legitimate content than non-pirates.

The research, which was not funded by the entertainment industry, was conducted by Kantar Media among 21,474 participants and took place in 2012 across four separate stages. Over that time, the ratio of legal to illegal content fell -- confirming a suspected trend as legal streaming options became more available.

It also confirmed another suspicion -- that a relatively small number of web users are responsible for most piracy. In OfCom's data, just two percent of users conducted three quarters of all piracy. Ofcom described piracy as "a minority activity".

Of those surveyed, 58 percent accessed music, movie or TV content online, while 17 percent accessed illegal content sources. Those who admitted pirating content spent on average £26 every three months on legitimate content, set against an average spend of £16 among non-pirates.

For the first part of the study, the researchers compared the age of users with their reputation scores. They found that an individual’s reputation increases with age, at least into a user’s 40s. There wasn’t enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for older programmers. The researchers then looked at the number of different subjects that users asked and answered questions about, which reflects the breadth of their programming interests. The researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects users weighed in on between the ages of 15 and 30 – but that the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers’ 30s and into their early 50s.

Finally, the researchers evaluated the knowledge of older programmers (ages 37 and older) compared to younger programmers (younger than 37) in regard to relatively recent technologies – meaning technologies that have been around for less than 10 years. For two smartphone operating systems, iOS and Windows Phone 7, the veteran programmers had a significant edge in knowledge over their younger counterparts. For every other technology, from Django to Silverlight, there was no statistically significant difference between older and younger programmers. “The data doesn’t support the bias against older programmers – if anything, just the opposite,” Murphy-Hill says.

'Millennials are more negative when it comes to product sentiment. They give more 1-star reviews than Gen X or Boomers; the most negative Millennials in our analysis hail from Ireland, where 12% of them give products 1- or 2-star ratings.' Previously, we tended not to complain -- not any more, it seems